Heartbeats in measures to a familiar tune
by KrystinaSky
Summary: He said goodbye like he was going to come back, but neither one of them really believed him, and River has someone important counting on her to get out alive, and survive what's waiting for her on the other side. In which River escapes from the Library and tries to escape from the Doctor, but it's hard to run away when you don't really want to.
1. Chapter 1

This is a going to be a long one! It's about half-written, and I think I've got the plot all figured out, but I need a little extra motivation to keep up with it, so I'm posting it now. Started before the 50th, so the story picks up where The Name of The Doctor left off.

Thanks for reading! 

She can still taste the goodbye in his kiss as her eyes open to silver, painted stars on a ceiling pulled from her memories. Charlotte, perched in a window sill with her crayons and coloring books, looks up.

"Did he say it?" Charlotte asks, swinging round to face River.

"Yes, he did." River tells her, smiling a little sadly and sitting up, tucking her knees under her chin to mirror Charlotte.

"So is it time now?" Charlotte asks.

"Yes dear, I think it's time." 

She decides not to rush it, mostly for Charlotte's sake. They'd been talking and working on it together for years, but the old-soul sadness is seeping out of the cracks in Charlotte's little-girl smile. She'd never say it, but the way her little fingers curl around River's tells her that she doesn't want to let go. She will though. For all her childishness and ancientness (River can never decide which of the two is more selfish), Charlotte is the most selfless person River has ever met.

_4022 people saved, cradled, burning bright lives swirling through her little head as the years passed heavy._

They go to Fortescue's Ice Cream shop in Diagon Alley. The sun is shining, and she's pulled the shop out of the second book in the series, before the war. There are smiles and laughing children in the bright, late-summer sunlight. A couple tables away Harry and Ron and Hermione are eating their ice creams too. The sun melts River's ice cream quicker than she can eat it and she licks it off her thumb as it drips.

"Should I bring Anita and everyone here or do you want to go back to the house and say good-bye there?" Charlotte asks her. She's watching the three young heroes at the other table and River's heart aches.

"Let's go back to the house after this." River tells her, and Charlotte looks up and smiles, understanding the unspoken _this is the me and the you time, just for us._

Their afternoon stretches out until the shadows grow long, and if it takes longer for evening to fall than it should, River is happy to pretend not to notice. 

Back at the house River tucks the two children in for the last time. They all huddle together on Charlotte's bed, a warm pile of smiles and pointy elbows pressed against her sides as River reads to them. She takes her time, reading and reading well past their bed time until they drift off to sleep and Charlotte's eyelids are heavy. She carries the little boy and the little girl to their beds and kisses their foreheads. Her eyes prickle with unshed tears, and she lingers over each of them, memorizing the sound of their soft breathing. When she's done she goes back to sit next to Charlotte, wrapping an arm around her little shoulders.

"Should we wait until tomorrow?" She asks her.

Charlotte shakes her head against River's shoulder.

"No, we've had a long time already," she says, bravely. River hugs her a little tighter and kisses her head.

They go downstairs together and River says goodbye to her team. They've gotten close, through the years together in the mainframe. Closer to each other than to River, though; they'd formed families, units with the children between them, tying their hearts together. River had only ever been half with them, really. She'd been waiting, always waiting.

She had been closest to Anita, and as they hug goodbye Anita says, "You know it's really not so bad here, are you sure you can't stay?"

One last time River shakes her head and says, "I can't, Anita, if there's a chance I can save him I have to try."

Anita pulls back and drops her voice, "You don't know if it will work."

"I have to try." River says again.

Anita shakes her head, "You know," she says, with a sad smile, "I'd sort of been hoping you'd never get that goodbye you've been waiting for. I'm a terrible friend."

"You're a wonderful friend," River tells her, pulling her back in for another hug, "and if it weren't for-you know- maybe I'd have been able to do it, just stay here with you."

Anita snorts, shaking her head, "Oh please, I don't believe that for a second, River Song."

"I'm so sorry Anita." River says, pulling her in for another hug, "If this works, I'll find some way to contact you, I promise."

"Oh, you'd better." Anita says, and with a watery smile she steps back.

With all the good-byes said, River takes a moment for one last look at the four people who had followed her into the library all those years ago. They look happy, and they're together, and considering they'd all technically been eaten alive by shadow monsters, it looks very much like a happy ending; one of those happily-ever-after's that tend to crop up in all Charlotte's favorite books.

"I'll miss you." She tells them.

Other Dave says, "Only if you survive," and Anita hits him.

River just laughs, "Well yeah, there is that."

"We'll miss you too." Says proper Dave, and Evanglista nods in agreement from his side. 

She materializes with Charlotte in their reading room. It's not really a reading room, of course; it's a file where they've been saving all of their research over the years. There isn't much to go on, even in the largest library in the universe information on Time Lords is scare. They've been at it for a long time though, and the shelves are lined with books, their pages marked, and notebooks filled with findings covering desks and chairs and lamp stands.

"This seemed like the best place to go from," Charlotte tells her. Now that they're so close to the end she can see a quiver to Charlotte's lower lip, and she doesn't meet River's eyes.

River kneels down in front of her, catching her face between her hands.

"Charlotte, darling, you listen to me, alright?" Charlotte nods, meeting her eyes, "Whatever happens today, I am so very, very grateful to you. You, my dear, are the bravest, kindest and brightest person I know. You have done absolutely everything you could to help me, and if-" Charlotte cuts her off with a little sob, "-no, really dearest, if this doesn't work today, it doesn't matter, alright? We tried, we did our best and it is _not_ your fault." Charlotte is crying now and River pulls her into a hug. "Oh Charlotte, I love you so much." Charlotte hugs her back, with all the strength in her little arms until the tears finally stop. They pull apart and Charlotte manages a smile.

"You know I-I uploaded you right before-right before you were going to-to you know…stop," Charlotte says, "It's going to probably hurt, a lot, once you, once you get back out there."

"That's okay Charlotte."

They pull apart and River steps back, filling her eyes with Charlotte's face.

_If this is the end she wants the last thing she sees to be something wonderful._

Charlotte smiles and River locks her face against the back of her eyelids as she closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath, reaching for a still place in her head.

It starts as a tingle in her fingers and toes, the feeling spreading until it's everywhere.

There's a familiar flash of light burning across the synapses of her mind and suddenly there is _pain_.

White hot and raging, burning across her mind and through every cell-burning, burning so that her lungs can't pull in the air and her hearts are seizing up and through it all the worst of it is _panic, fear_.

It's not hers. She curls down around the little mind screaming and dying and through the burning death of the cells in her eyes something familiar and golden swirls up though the white spacesuit that covers her abdomen. For a moment it is a different sort of burning against her insides, and then it catches in her blood, spreading through her body and it is dying, but it isn't just dying anymore, it's _changing_.

_Charlotte's voice, soft and sweet in the quiet reading room, "In their infancy, the energy that allows adults to change their body to avoid death is extremely concentrated. For this reason, cross-breeding with other species is virtually an impossibility. _

_His long fingers trailing across her belly button, "We grew our children in bottles."_

_"Why?"_

_"Convenience."_

When her eyes open the sun is too bright and her mind is sizzling as the neurons re-align. She's trying to remember something, and someone else is with her, someone scared and glowing and very, very new.

_Charlotte is sleeping in an armchair and the room is lit by just the one lamp next to River as she reads. The book is very old, the language ancient and difficult to decipher, even for her. The story is even older, more of a legend really, about a dying goddess and a child who saved her in a wave of golden light. _

_"It makes sense, really." She tells Charlotte later, pacing, "It's survival. If the mother were to die the baby would die too, so, theoretically for the sake of survival, the baby could automatically, you know, transfer some of that excess regeneration energy to the mother."_

_"River, what are you doing?" he asks her through his half-open eyes as his heart beats catch tune again under hers._

She thinks about moving out of the sunlight but _something in the shadows eating chicken legs and use the red settings it doesn't have red settings but yes it does, it should, it should, it should._

She stays in the sunlight, trying to focus past the snapping sizzling in her brain and the _fearfearfear_ that is breaking her hearts.

_"I'll make sure you re-materialize in the sunlight" Charlotte says, as they sit together in the highest tower of Cair Paravel watching dolphins and mermaids glinting together in the sea far, far below. "I figured out how to call Mr. Lux, I'll tell him you're coming. You just have to get to the transporters before nightfall."_

There is a doorway to her left, a doorway that will lead to a hall that will lead to a sunlit walkway to a building where 4022 people left the library. She has to go too. Her legs are all funny when she rises, the lengths aren't right. She misjudges where her body is in relation to the door and she runs into the doorjamb painfully as she tries to walk through. As she falls she tucks her body that is _all wrong and snapping golden underneath_ around her stomach. Something important and scared and then there is_ red like shifting walls around her face and "you will be brave" and glinting strong and warm with large hands that carry her back and "you're safe now"._

_I'll keep you safe_ she thinks through the fluttering fear against the edges of her new brain, and she stumbles through the door and the hall and the sunlit walkway that drops away, a long fall on either side _won't be there to catch you every time, yes that's right, actually isn't it?_

The dust in the transporter room is different than everywhere else- all kicked up and littered with footprints.

_4022 people with two feet each, so many footprints as they lined up to leave the library. Two more people but just one more set of footprints._

She waits, huddled on the transporter ring, trying to keep her new hands and feet tucked inside the circle, just waiting for _the girl who waited but didn't wait alone, strong and warm and keeping her safe as 2000 years passed. _

She wraps her arms around her middle and her new mouth makes words and it feels funny but it's important so she whispers against the shadows gathering at the corners of the room as the day passes, "I'll keep you safe."

Finally she hears the transporter come alive around her. She's vaguely aware that it's been hours, but time feels unfamiliar after too long in the computer where it never seemed to work right. The transporter takes all her cells apart again, and they don't like it so soon after regeneration and just getting acquainted with themselves and each other. When she gets to the other side and all put together again the golden light is bursting out of the cracks and it hurts and _fearfearfear._

_Too young_ she thinks, _he doesn't understand that this isn't dying._

She is vaguely aware of people running forward, trying to help, and she thinks it must be her voice, strange and new humming in her throat telling them to stay, stay away, please.

The baby _yes, yes, that's what's nestles there against her new spine, _panics, little hearts fluttering too fast, much, much too fast until the tiny body can't keep up and she feels him _dying, _dragging a sob up out of her throat, and then he is changing, the glow breaking out through the cracks between her fingers as she presses them against her abdomen.

As the glow fades the people press close again, their voices sounding strange in her new ears and then their hands on her arms and shoulders, her back, so very strange. She realizes she is crying. Mr. Lux is there, she remembers him _contracts in pieces falling on the floor in the shadows._ But his face is different, older, she thinks, _more lines means older because he's human_.

He says, "Professor Song? Is that you Professor Song?" Of course it is, she thinks, he's being silly but then no he's not really because she has a new face now, a new face so she has to tell him, "Yes, yes I'm Professor Song.' With tears all over her new face.

They're talking about heart rates around her, sounding confused and urgent and she thinks she should probably tell them that she and the baby have two hearts each, but her mind is stuck, looping and looping around the words_ baby_ and _new face_, sliding back and forth between English and Gallifreyan as her eyes

slide

closed.

_"Professor Song, is that a picnic basket?" The way the sound flows around her name is familiar even though the voice is wrong. She turns and tries to hide her disappointment when she sees his face. It's a nice face, really, and the hair is lovely, but his eyes don't know her like she needs them to today._

_"Always the observant one, aren't you Sweetie?" She says, forcing a smile. _

_"Were you the one who called me here? I think there's some kind of emergency…"_

_"What makes you think it's an emergency?" _

_"The note said 'come quickly'." _

_She smirks, and says, "Doesn't sound like an emergency to me."_

_He looks at her for a moment, frustrated and strung taught and something haunted on his face. He's silent for longer than she's comfortable with._

_"Why am I here?"_

_She holds up the picnic basket pointedly._

_"There had better be something really, really important in that basket." He says._

_"There is actually."_

_It's just lunch, in the basket, but it's a very nice lunch and she brought a blanket that she makes him help her spread out on the grass. Summer on Asgard is a beautiful season, and it's a perfect day, just like she'd planned. _

_"So what's the occasion?" he asks._

_"Again with the assumptions, who says it's an occasion?" _

_"It just…feels like one," he says, "that's a nice dress." _

_She stretches one leg out farther than she needs to so that the hem of the blue dress slides a little too far up her thigh. She doesn't look at him, but she does smirk because she knows he's looking, he always does. "It's one of your favorites," she tells him._

_"I thought you were supposed to keep spoilers like that to yourself," he complains, plucking at the grass._

_"Oops," she says, "let's call it a preview instead."_

_ "Is today special?" he presses, looking back up at her, searching._

_"Not at all, doesn't matter really, I just wanted to tell you something." She says, pulling plastic containers of food out of the basket and spreading it out on the blanket between them._

_"What did you want to tell me?"_

_She pulls her dress away from her waist a bit more and makes sure the bio-dampeners in her earrings are secure. "Nevermind, Sweetie, it can wait. Here, take these," she says, quickly, hoping to distract him. He opens the Tupperware and sniffs at the contents. _

_"What is it?" He asks._

_Her hearts clench and she takes a long swallow of her grape juice before she can answer._

_"Those are fish fingers," she says, "I brought custard to dip them in."_

_"What? Do fish have fingers? No, they don't, at least not on earth. Wait, you know I have met fish with fingers except… they were actually…fish people." He drops the container of fish fingers quickly. _

_She laughs at him, because really, some things don't change and she loves that. "No Sweetie, they're bits of fish that you eat _with_ your fingers. Fish Fingers, see?" She takes a bite to prove their edibility to him._

_"And you dip them in custard?" He asks, sounding intrigued._

_"Yes dear, you dip them in custard." _

_"Seems a bit strange." He says._

_"Yes it is." She agrees._


	2. Chapter 2

Hello again! Thank you SO much to everyone who reviewed the first chapter, it's very encouraging to receive your feedback!

Someone asked about what River looks like, I don't go into a lot of detail here but I'll try to sneak little bits in as we go along, and of course feel free to use your imagination!

Thank you for reading and Merry Christmas! 

She wakes up in a hospital room. A soft beeping from the machine monitoring her brain wave patterns sounds, and a nurse walks in moments later.

"Hello Professor Song," she says, "how are you feeling?'

"Drugged", River tells her, feeling the weight of her limbs and a haziness to her thoughts.

"They had to sedate you as soon as you arrived on Mr. Lux's ship," the nurse says, checking a monitor over River's head, "they were concerned about psychological stress to the baby."

The words sink through the drug and brain-cell shaken haze, and her hearts seize up, her hands flying to her abdomen.

"The baby, is he alright?"

The nurse puts her hand on River's shoulder and she has kind eyes.

"_I think I'd like to be a nurse."_ _16 year old Rory Williams tells them around a mouthful of ice cream._

"I'll get the doctor, he'll explain everything to you," the nurse says, turning to leave.

River catches her wrist, "Just… he's alive, isn't he?" she asks. She could check for herself, of course, but she's so afraid and the nurse's eyes are warm and she thinks it would be better to hear it from warm eyes rather than to reach down and find the emptiness herself.

"Yes he is, Professor Song," The nurse tells her, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. River nods, gives her a grateful smile, and as soon as the nurse is gone she's crying again. It's a happy, relieved crying this time.

"_Happy crying is the most human sort of crying there is," he tells her after their fifth wedding._

"_Than what's your excuse?" she asks, and kisses him again._

She reaches under the hospital blanket and the flimsy gown to rest her hand against her stomach. The skin feels too warm and she smells burn cream. They applied it before the excess regeneration energy kicked in and healed the damage, because when she pulls the blankets back the skin is healed and buzzing under her fingertips.

_His lips on her broken hand and his life sealing up the cracks, bright and golden. She runs away, shooting words like arrows to keep him at bay behind her. _

"_River!"_

Two tiny heartbeats echo up her spine. They're still a little too fast, out of sync with her own, but the place in her head that had screamed with his fear and pain is quiet, sleeping. She writes Galifreyan across the space between her new hip bones, swirling _safe _and _love_ there in the past, present continual tense.

_He's written many, many old words into her skin, but never 'safe'_, _and she finds out why at the end as she watches him watch her die._

In spite of the drugs, she knows when the doctor is coming and pulls the hospital gown back down just as he opens the door.

"Professor Song, how are you feeling?"

"Drugged," she says again, "but it's fading. Are you here to fix that?"

The doctor smiles and introduces himself as Doctor Toryn Reed. As he washes his hands he describes his extensive education and accomplishments in the medical field disinterestedly, like he's reading someone else's resume. He also reveals that he had been selected by Mr Lux personally to treat River.

"Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. You're a bit of a miracle Professor Song, and a hero, did you know that?"

She shakes her head, "I've been in a computer for a while, you'll have to fill me in."

He sits down on the hovering stool next to her hospital bed, looking over the monitors and reports flowing from the machinery around him to the computer in his hands as he talks.

"4022 people, missing for a hundred years, come home. It was incredible. Practically the only thing the press talked about for a week straight. Mr. Lux gave a lot of interviews of course. He wrote a book too, it was a bestseller."

River thinks she should feel grateful, but she just feels vaguely annoyed; Mr Lux hadn't know the half of what had happened in that library. "Oh, really?" she says.

"Yup. It's called", he pauses, clears his throat softly around a little smirk, 'The Last Song in the Library'"

River snickers, "Seriously? He actually called his book that?"

"He did, I laughed at it too," he sits back, grinning at her, "I think I'm going to like you, Professor Song."

"Sometimes people do," River tells him.

"Good thing too, in the book you were a bit…melodramatic. I don't do well with _melodramatic._" He says, wiping his hands on a towel with an expression of distaste.

"Would you have quit?" She asks him, "If I'd been the melodramatic type?"

"Ha!" he says, "Are you kidding? I told you, Mr. Lux _hand-picked me_. Do you have any idea how much I'm getting paid for this?"

"It's good to know my doctor has such pure motives," she settles back against her pillows with a smirk. The banter feels good, like slipping into an old pair of shoes.

"Purely monetary," he assures her, "Speaking of money," he pulls a pair of gloves over his wrists, releasing them with a snap, "I want you to know that in spite of all the money and time I poured into my post-doctorate specialized certification in semi-human and alien physiology, I haven't got a clue what you and baby here _are_." He glares at her, a spark of humor in his eyes softening the expression, " It's very frustrating."

"Terribly sorry about that," she says, smiling.

"As you should be." 

She explains the basics of regeneration to him, and what Charlotte had done, uploaded her body in the nanosecond between the completion of the upload and the complete failure of her body, preserving it in that state as Charlotte had the 4022 occupants of the library hundreds of years before. She tells him that her consciousness had been preserved in another form and uploaded directly into the mainframe. She doesn't tell him by whom or the reasons why.

"_One more run River, you and me."_

"In all of the uploading and saving and whatnot, nobody knew to save the baby, he was as good as dead."

"So you decided to try to find a way to get out."

She nods, "We did some research, in the mainframe. It's the largest library in the universe, so lots of materials, you know."

She explains their findings to him, he carefully notes the titles of the books they'd found.

"So basically, infant, sorry, Time Lords?" she nods, "Right, baby….Time Lords…they're producing all this energy as they develop so that they can do that cellular regeneration thing you do to keep from dying and ageing and all that." He pauses, and she nods, confirming, "You didn't have any left, so when you were dying your baby passed you a bunch of it, and you were able to regenerate and survive, and you ended up with a new face out of the whole deal as well."

"Basically," she says.

"Right, okay," he pauses for a moment, scribbling something into his computer with his finger, "Any idea why the baby has continued to regenerate?" Her hands settle back over her stomach, tensing.

"How many times has it happened?" she asks.

"Twice, since you were brought here."

She feels sick, remembering the first time and the second time, the feel of him _dying_ inside of her. It had happened again, twice now while she'd been sleeping.

"That's not supposed to happen," she says.

"I was afraid of that. We're not sure what's triggering it, but each time the baby's heart – sorry – _hearts_ rate increases until cardiac arrest, and then the regeneration happens."

"He's scared," she says, softly, curling her fingers over her stomach

"We can't know that," he says gently, "we don't even know how aware it is at this stage of development."

She shakes her head, "No, he's scared, I can tell."

"Oh," the doctor says, he pauses, clears his throat, "er, psychic are you?"

"A bit, yeah."

"Lovely," he says, scratching his head awkwardly.

She watches him, her eyebrows raising in disbelief. Surely not…."Maybe I should mention it only works with physical contact…."

"Oh! Good, right that's, you know, very…fascinating. Scientifically."

"Why doctor, something in your head you don't want me to see?"

There's some red creeping up from his collar and high on his cheekbones.

_Seriously?_

Her eyebrows shoot up,

"I'm a very old, pregnant, alien lady. And I was dead last week…."

"Right," he says, quickly, cutting her off, "Well anyway. The good news is we've found a sedative that works on both of you. As long as we can keep baby calm, hopefully we won't have any more problems." She lets him change the subject.

"I suppose that means I'm stuck in bed for a while?"

"Most definitely."

She groans, "Forewarning, I'm not very good at keeping still."

"We'll try our best to keep you occupied. Anything I can get you at the moment?"

"A mirror, please."

"A mirror?" He looks surprised, "I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, food, maybe some reading materials…."

"I haven't actually seen my new face yet, I'm suddenly thinking it might be a rather attractive one," she says, eying him pointedly as the red flares across his neck again.

He hurries to his feet, avoiding eye contact and making a show of fiddling with his hand-held computer, "I'll send the nurse in with one."

"Thank you doctor."

"Anytime professor," he waves over his shoulder, his voice floating back to her through the open door, "As long as the pay is good ." 

The mirror arrives with her lunch and the whole lot is a bit of a disappointment. The sandwich tastes like dirt in her mouth, the mayonnaise clinging to her tongue and throat. She used to like mayonnaise.

"_Ugh," says Amelia, "my Mum never listens. Look at the mayonnaise in this sandwich, it's like frosting!"_

"_Looks fine to me," Mels tells her, sitting down with her greasy hamburger from the school cafeteria. She notices the napkin the sandwich had been wrapped in crumpled next to Amelia's juice box. Her Mum had written, 'Love you darling' in purple ink and signed it with 'xoxo'. _

"_Trade you," Mels says, and Amelia happily agrees._

They take her unfinished lunch away and leave her with a small hand-held mirror. The search for something her new taste buds will accept takes up the rest of the afternoon.

When an orderly comes in with the second meal attempt (a blueberry muffin and cream cheese), she is laughing.

"I got my dad's nose," she tells him, chuckling (she has to tell _someone)_ and reaching for the muffin. The muffin is promptly spit out and the orderly goes off to search for something else (celery, preferably, maybe a side of ketchup).

The eyes are Rory's mum's, which is interesting, and the hair is Amy's, only curly. Really curly. She's pretty sure that shouldn't have happened again. Three faces in a row with the curls. Interesting.

"A few freckles too," she tells the orderly as he returns with her celery, "that's new."

He looks at her blankly, and sighs tiredly as she pushes the bitten celery and smeared ketchup back to him a moment later. 


	3. Chapter 3

Nighttime at the hospital is incredibly lonely. Every night, as the orderlies, doctors and nurses trickle out, she can feel the white walls closing in around her like Stormcage had on that first, terrible night, before he came to take her away. She hardly ever sleeps, of course, but they turn the lights out and draw the curtains and the darkness is so thick she can almost feel it against her skin. She tries to read, but reading reminds her of stories with Charlotte's little hand in hers, and oh, she _misses _her, so she stops reading. When she stops reading, she finds herself remembering 300 years' worth of nights in prison that were not actually spent in prison. She remembers his face and his hands and his voice and oh, she _misses _him too.

When she does sleep, she dreams, but there is no relief there either. She dreams almost always about him, and they are rarely happy dreams because at the end they are always saying goodbye

Six days into her stay at the hospital she wakes up a few hours before dawn with two gunshots echoing in her ears and his body on the sand blazing across the back of her eyelids as they fly open.

The heart-rate monitor is blinking red and an automated voice repeats, "Heart-rate has exceeded the safety limit, please remain calm and the on-call doctor will be with you shortly."

Of course it's not her hearts that are the problem, and she presses her fingers against her stomach and her thoughts against the building fear of the little mind there.

"I'm sorry," she whispers, "I'm so sorry baby, we're safe, don't be scared."

The doctor arrives with sleep still gathered around the corners of his eyes and quickly administers a sedative. He spends a few minutes with her, speaking quietly and checking vitals before he leaves her alone again in the dark.

"_I'm so sorry River," he says. It's been years of nights with him for her, but she can tell tonight it's still new for him by the way he stares around her cell, and the guilt on his face._

"_Why?"_

"_You're in prison and it's my fault."_

_She laughs, taking his face between her hands and drawing his eyes down to hers, "Sweetie, I've never been as free as I am right now," and she kisses him to prove it, and there is no voice in her head whispering about death and hope in an endless war and youmustkillthedoctor, because she is free._

She had been told to move as little as possible, but she suddenly feels like she can't breathe, like the darkness is a weight on her chest and if she stays laying there she will suffocate slowly. River gets up to draw the curtains back from her window. The floor feels like ice against her bare feet and the room spins. She doesn't know the length of her own arms and legs, and it take her longer than it should to take the few steps between her and the window. She feels like a cripple, like her body is another kind of prison and the thought stirs a dangerous panic at the back of her mind that she fights back immediately, drawing deep breaths.

When she does reach the window and the button that pulls back the automated curtains, she stands there, hands gripping the sill and eyes locked on the stars. She presses one hand and her forehead against the glass and lets the silvery moonlight ease the weight of the darkness against her chest.

"Would you like to hear a story?" she whispers to the baby, "I know, you're too little to understand stories," she pauses for a moment, with a sardonic smile, "well, at the moment you're sedated anyway, aren't you? But Mummy needs the practice, ok? Once upon a time that never actually happened, the bravest man in the universe kept his wife safe for a very long time while she slept. She was always tired, his wife, she hated waking up in the mornings and was usually late for school," she stops for a moment, smiling at the memories,

"Don't be like that, baby, alright? Anyway, this time she slept for so, so long. 2000 years, actually. Lots of things happened, people came and tried to take her away sometimes, there were terrible fires, floods and wars. And that man, the bravest man in the universe, was all alone, just waiting for her to wake up. He didn't give up though" She has to stop again, biting her lip to hold back the tears, "he kept her safe from everything and everyone until the day she woke up. And after that, darling, they were always together, and he was never alone again."

She turns to the side, leaning her shoulder against the window and cradling both hands around the small bump of her belly.

"I am not the bravest man in the universe – well, obviously, I'm not a man, or I'd be your dad rather than your mom – but that's not the point. I'm not the bravest man in the universe, but I am his daughter, and I'll keep you safe. I promise, and you will never be alone." River strokes her thumbs across her stomach, picturing tiny fingers and toes all curled up and still.

_Sometimes she can remember flashes, the way her fingers were too small to wrap around the hilt of the gun, the weight of it against her small arms dragging it down to point at the sand._

She goes back to bed and spends the rest of the night telling stories. She doesn't tell the sad ones, just happy, silly stories about Amy, Rory and Mels in Leadworth. The nights pass a little quicker after that, with the curtains open and the stories that make her smile.

On the nights she does sleep, the dreams continue. She sees Doctor Reed almost daily, but nothing they try seems to work, either to keep the dreams away or to keep the baby from reacting. A month into her stay at the hospital, the sedatives stop working and the baby regenerates again. It's just as horrible as she remembers, the fear and the dying, and they call in Doctor Reed who turns up with red-rimmed eyes and his shirt on backwards.

When all the tests are done he sits beside her bed, his shoulders falling into a slump.

"The baby is getting weaker," he tells her, softly.

"I know."

"How many times can he do the, uh…regeneration?"

"I don't know," she tells Doctor Reed, but she can feel it draining out of him, she can see it sometimes, a soft glow that should be lovely but isn't. It's like blood dripping slowly (but oh, not slowly enough) from an open wound.

"Not much longer, I think."

She doesn't sleep for two weeks, and the exhaustion writes itself across her face in dark lines beneath her eyes. Doctor Reed doesn't look much better than she does.

On a Wednesday afternoon he comes in quietly with a frighteningly defeated slump to his shoulder. He sits in the stool next to her bed and takes her hand in both of his, pressing firmly.

"River", he says after a moment, "I don't know what else to do."

She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

"We just don't have enough information. I've tried everything, talked to everyone I can think of, but I just… I don't know how to fix this, River. I am so sorry." He presses their clasped hands against his forehead, and it's probably just the exhaustion, but he's squeezing his eyes shut like he might cry.

Fighting down her own despair, she curls her fingers around his and squeezes his hand lightly, "Don't worry Doctor Reed, I'm pretty sure Mr. Lux is still legally obligated to pay you," she teases him, but her voice shakes.

He laughs shortly, "Well good, because I've already picked out my space yacht and I'm very attached."

He puts their clasped hands down and scoots a little closer.

"River, what about the baby's father?"

Her hearts squeeze and there's afternoon daylight pouring through the open window but she feels like she's being choked by the dark again. She fixes her face still and impassive.

"What about him?" she asks.

"Is he…still alive?"

She thinks she can see where the conversation is going and doesn't like it. She considers lying for a moment, decides against it. "No. Well actually, it's complicated, but basically yes he is."

"Somehow I feel like that should be a very not-complicated yes-or-no question," he says, wryly.

"I'm an old, pregnant, alien lady, and I was dead last month, remember? Everything is complicated."

"Okay then, let me re-phrase the question. Alive or dead or whatever, can we contact him? Would he, you know, be able to…help somehow? Wait, sorry, he is, you know, the same…species as you, right?"

"Well… basically yes," she tells him.

"Yes to which?"

"The species part."

"And the other part?"

"He might know something," she tells him, and really, he's the only one left in the universe to ask, "but he didn't know about the baby, and he doesn't know I'm alive," she takes a deep breath, because she's never said it aloud before, "And I don't want him to know. Ever." The words hurt a little bit on the way out, and they hang in the air, cold and hard.

Doctor Reed looks at her, a shadow passing over his eyes. He's too professional to ask though, and she's glad.

"Could someone else approach him, or could we contact him in a way that wouldn't have to involve you?"

"I….don't know. Probably not, he's a bit difficult to pin down."

"Yes, I've heard sort-of-dead people sometimes are."

"Well I'm not," she points out, motioning to the hospital bed she's hardly left in weeks.

"Yes but you're my patient, and pregnant, and that would be entirely inappropriate." As soon as the words leave his mouth he turns bright red, drops her hand and leans back from the bed, eyes wide and looking down. She laughs at him and bites back a few flirty responses on the tip of her tongue, changing the subject before he flees the room in embarrassment.

"We're really out of options then?" she asks after a moment, sobering.

"I'm afraid so," he tells her.

With the assistance of a surprisingly helpful Mr. Lux, River is able to contact the Library mainframe, namely Charlotte, and her team. She begins her own research again, with Charlotte's help, going over all the information they had gathered again and again, and coming to the same conclusion Doctor Reed had.

At night she tries not to worry. She keeps telling stories, and she puts off sleeping until exhaustion drags her eyelids closed and the nightmares came. She wakes up to sleepy, growing panic at the back of her mind as the effectiveness of the new medicine wears off far too quickly.

There is only one place left in the universe that might have the answers they need, and the inevitability presses in on her. It's not all bad though.

_The door closing on darkening Berlin and the man dying on the floor in a fancy suit. Something warm and golden pressing around her shoulders like Amy's arms and Rory's voice, but different because this one knows who she is. Feeling like home as all the terror drains slowly and quiet and soft and not really words but more like feelings of "safe now" and "everythingisgoingtobealrightbecauseI'vebeentotheend"._

If she's honest (which she is sometimes is and wants to be very much although she knows she's out of practice), she wants to go back to the TARDIS too. In the quiet moments, at night between stories, she can feel the sudden homelessness of her new existence. She has no home to go back to, not even a prison cell. There is no family or friends waiting to welcome her back to life. Mr. Lux, strangely kind and gentle with the new lines of 13 years on his face, had shown her the footage of the 2044 coming home. After a hundred years, their direct families and friends were gone, but there were grandchildren and great grandchildren and nephews and nieces waiting with open arms as they stepped tearfully from the ship. She had blamed the lump in her own throat on the pregnancy.

The idea of home feels wonderful. Sometimes, when the fear starts to rise in the pit of her stomach she closes her eyes and reaches for the feel of the warm console room light against her skin and her thoughts. She _wants _to go back, to feel home and breathe it in. What she so very much does not want is to see him seeing her and now knowing her. Again. The thought makes her feel ill, but she blames that on the pregnancy too.

She tells Doctor Reed as little as she can. She tells him that she's going to have to do some time travelling, probably some running and most definitely some disguising. Staying in bed is really not going to work. He hestiantly tells her he can give her at most six weeks on a strong dose of a new sedative before the effects wear off.

"Can you do what you need to in six weeks?" he asks her, worry creasing his brow.

"I'm going to have to."

"This is really, very dangerous. Are you sure someone else can't go?"

"Positive." She tells him, because even if there was someone else who could read the Galifreyan, just finding the library would be almost impossible without the help of the TARDIS herself.

Mr. Lux turns up for his weekly visit with a vortex manipulator and a set of perception filters. She doesn't ask and neither does he, but she knows he's in contact with Charlotte. He tells her to be careful and hands her a bank account number on a post-it note and squeezes her shoulder on his way out.

Tracking the Doctor down, plotting out ways to meet him, potential points along his timeline and relationships she can exploit is all as natural as breathing. She was trained for this, to track him down, to get close to him, and it's so much simpler than trying to get his attention ever was.

She plays with the idea of looping back in his timeline. Joining up with him and one of his less-romantically inclined companions is certainly the most appealing option. She spends the most time on Donna, planning out way she could step into the events of his life while he'd travelled with her without making too much fuss.

She'd really rather liked Donna.

_In tandem they rip up the contracts and the pieces fall, fluttering to the floor. _

At the end though, she decides it's too dangerous to risk stepping back. Which leaves her with going forward.

Which means Clara, and the Doctor with his 11th face and the bowtie.

"_what am I doing?"_

"_As you're told."_

She stops telling stories at night, occupied with planning instead. She traces as far as she dares along Clara's timeline, pinpoints the most likely relevant time period which would be, for Clara, immediately following Tranzalore. She studies Clara, the real, original Clara, everything she can find. She hires an ex-time agent on the shadier side of the law to take her new vortex manipulator for a spin, sending him to different points along Clara's timeline to gather information. She compiles it all neatly and she begins to design her own character, someone unobtrusive to fit neatly into Clara's life exactly when she needs to. She sends the time agent out again to lay the groundwork for her identity. When it's all done she pays him extra to take a hallucinogenic, just enough to addle his memories of the weeks spent working for her. She's a professional, after all.

She can see the worry in Doctor Reed's eyes each time they meet. He stays longer than he needs to each time, repeating things she already knows and things that she doesn't really need to know (the Murarian birthing process, for example. The males lay eggs). She lets him, because she is learning that he is very kind, and the concern under all his babbling warms her hearts even after he leaves and all the lights go out and she is alone again.

On the day she is set to leave the hospital he arrives in the morning to administer the sedatives. After weeks of worried babbling, he is very quiet and he moves slowly.

"Do you have any family, Doctor Reed?" two months together, and she'd never asked him about himself, and suddenly it bothers her.

"Just my mum," he tells her, coming to sit next to her bed, "my Dad kicked off before I was born, we've never heard from him."

"Foolish. You must not have gotten your intelligence from him then."

He smiles at her, a warm, genuine sort of smile, and it makes him look so very young. He has a nice face, really; high, sharp cheekbones and a clean, square jaw line. His eyebrows are thick over his intelligent eyes, and there's almost always a little crease in-between them.

He moves to sit on the edge of her bed, right next to her, his knee brushing against her hip.

"I will miss you," he tells her, and there's a stark honesty in his voice and in the way he covers her hand with his.

She smiles at him, turning her hand to squeeze just the tips of his fingers. "I'll be back before you know it. Time travel, you know."

"Whether it's six minutes or six weeks, I'll spend the entire time completely worried. Have I mentioned my high blood pressure?" he says, leaning in slightly.

"You're much too young for high blood pressure."

"Apparently not. Anyway, now that you know, keep it in mind, would you?"

"Are you trying to make me feel guilty?" she teases him.

"Absolutely, it's completely your fault," he tells her, and kisses her forehead very quickly before he says goodbye.


	4. Chapter 4

She'd received the first letter from Anthony when he was six years old. Passed cleverly through time with the help of her parents, there had been zoo animals with too-many legs doodled in the corners and Rory's neat, small handwriting over the words little Anthony had grossly misspelled.

There had been more letters over the years. She'd kept them all, along with a few pictures and the odd newspaper clipping. The plan had always been to visit him, someday, when losing her parents didn't hurt quite so much. But then she'd gone and died, and she'd regretted it, all those years of waiting, clinging to newspaper scraps and letters when it would have been so easy to just go and find him.

He'd retired in a quiet little suburban neighborhood outside New York. He spent his time volunteering at a small non-profit children's hospital and making regular house calls in the rougher areas of New York City proper. He was an experienced parent too, raising foster children for thirty years with his wife until she had passed away suddenly.

River materializes on Anthony's doorstep a day before she is planning to meet Clara. The 21st century always feels nostalgic, the fresh smell of it and the neatly trimmed patch of grass and rather eccentric flower bed, all clashing colors and funny little gnomes, draws a smile. When she turns around, the door is a familiar shade of blue. She runs her fingers across the brightness of the color, somehow the shade almost exactly what it ought to be. She briefly considers using the doorbell, but, well, the door is blue, so she lets herself in.

Inside, there are framed pictures everywhere, arranged on every horizontal surface and hung on every vertical, interspersed occasionally with children's drawings proudly showcased in frames, names and dates written in the corners.

On the table next to the front door, right next to Anthony's wedding photo, is a family photo of Amy and Rory and Anthony between them in his early twenties. Tucked into the corner of the frame over Rory's shoulder is a small picture of her face. She picks it up, noting the worn and faded edges around the modern, colored photo. She wonders which of her parents had been carrying the picture of her when they'd been taken by the angel.

"She has mad, curly hair, doesn't knock, and I find her crying over my family photos," she looks up from the picture in her hands to see Anthony standing at the end of the hall, holding a baseball bat and a smile, "hello significantly older sister Melody Pond."

"Anthony," she says, and her voice is strangely choked.

"Most people just call me Tony. Or Doctor Williams. Or 'Doc Wilz' as I'm known in, you know, the, ah, 'hood'" he says, making quotation marks in the air.

She laughs, and he looks so much like Rory for a moment, smiling awkwardly.

"What did they call you?"

"Mom and dad? Well, they did call me Anthony, actually."

"Well that settles it then."

He closes the distance between them and pulls her into a firm, lingering hug. She hugs him back, and it isn't even strange or awkward. Somehow, he smells like them, and when she closes her eyes and breathes in she can imagine that she is home.

"You ridiculous woman, Do you know how long I've been waiting for you? What took you so long?" he says into her hair.

"I'm sorry, Anthony," she says, "do you want to hear my excuses?"

"Well I don't know," he says, pulling back to grin down at her, "are they any good?"

"A bit, yeah. I did die once, very dramatically too."

"Ah, I was wondering what was with the new look."

"I can imagine, I can't believe you recognized me."

"Like I said, inviting yourself through my locked front door, crying over family photos. And the hair," he flicks at it lightly, "pretty sure that's Dad's nose too."

"Let's not talk about that."

They have tea, and they talk. They have so much to talk about, and talking to Anthony, listening to Anthony, is so very easy. They lose track of time and laugh when they realize it's 10pm, they're starving, their tea is stone cold and neither of them have taken more than a sip. Anthony takes a frozen pizza out of the freezer, and despite the light flavor of freezer burn, it's the best meal River has eaten since leaving the library.

Finally, in the early hours of the morning, Anthony's eyelids are heavy and his head drops blearily at intervals as he fights to stay awake.

"You know," he tells her, "if you'd come before I got so old I'd be able to stay awake longer."

She laughs at him, walks around the table and the remnants of their pizza to help him out of his chair. She pulls his arm over her shoulders and helps him stumble up the stairs to bed.

"Don't worry, I'm used to taking care of silly old men."

With Anthony in bed, and New York still dark and relatively quiet around her, River tries to focus on her planning. She finds she's far too happy to focus though, lying on Anthony's coach and staring at a crack in his ceiling. She knows she's grinning like mad, and the happiness feels like a glow hovering over the surface of her skin. She pulls her T-shirt up and writes about family and home across her stomach to the sleeping baby.

"I wish I could keep all of this feeling in a bottle," she whispers to him, "and take it out for you when you're scared."

She's crying; silly, happy, human crying.

_"Hi Honey, I'm home," he says, standing in the doorway of the kitchen with his crossed arms contrasting the warmth in his eyes._

_"And what sort of time do you call this?" she answers, turning to face him and mirroring his stance, and so, so happy that they both know their lines._

_"Well, Doctor Song, I hear it's called 'Christmas time'."_

_"Yes it is. About time you got here. They've been waiting for you. Every year."_

_"Yes, well, they were supposed to think I was dead. What part of 'tell no one what I said' sounded like, 'please tell your parents so they set a plate for me at Christmas every year and wait'?"_

_"Oh come now darling, you didn't think I do everything I'm told, did you?"_

_He walks into the kitchen and wraps her up in his arms and the strangely strong scent of pine._

_"No, I'd never think that," he says, hugging her tightly. A moment later, he murmurs into her hair, "Thank you, you mad, troublesome woman."_

_She tightens her arms around his waist and presses as close as she can so that their matching double heartbeats align. She can tell when he hears It too because he makes a strangled sound into her hair that is a funny mix of relief, joy, and a dash of heartbreak._

_The moments tick by, and they count them together between the spaces of their heartbeats. "Hey," he says abruptly, his voice rough, "what did you mean _they've_ been waiting for me every year?"_

_"Oh Sweetie," she says, pressing a kiss to his neck and feeling him shiver, "I don't wait for you, I come find you."_

River only sleeps for a few hours, but wakes up on Anthony's couch feeling more refreshed than she has in months. Possibly even years. There are no echoing gun shots or goodbye's in her ears. She could have slept more, but the neighbor's dog is unfortunately a bit upset about the man delivering the morning newspaper. Still, a barking dog is a much better sound to wake up to than a gunshot from the past.

Anthony is still very much asleep, so she spends a couple of hours cleaning up from the night before, and making a very large and impressive breakfast. She waits for another hour, but when Anthony still hasn't woken up, she helps herself to some blueberry pancakes, cinnamon French toast, (she had spent a while deliberating between the two before deciding to make both) bacon, a small omelet, and a large helping of cantaloupe. Apparently, cooking is something she does now.

She wraps up the rest for Anthony and quietly locks herself in the bathroom. It takes two hours to straighten her hair, even with the fancy equipment she'd brought from the future. She douses it in scientifically advanced spray to keep it that way, and sincerely hopes the promises on the bottle are true.

"They had better be," she mutters, glaring at the price tag, "considering what I paid for it."

Her costume is very simple; loose jeans and a T-shirt and some rather thick glasses. She pulls her newly-straight hair back into a ponytail and studies the effect in the mirror. It helps distract from the way her mouth is shaped like her mum's.

When she's finished, she re-emerges from the bathroom to find Anthony yawning as he walks down the stairs in his dressing gown and house slippers. His thin gray hair sticks up awkwardly in the back and she hides a grin at the picture he makes, stopping on the stairs to blink down at her sleepily.

"Good thing you didn't look like that yesterday, pretty sure I would've smacked you over the head with that bat no matter how many pictures you were crying over," he says, taking in her new look.

"Good morning to you too Anthony," she tells him, grinning and walking into the kitchen.

He follows, watching her throw a few more items into her small backpack.

"I've got to go out, I'll probably be out late."

"Where are you going?" he asks, sitting down at the table.

"It's complicated," she tells him, smiling apologetically.

He sighs, "Somehow I figured it would be."

River opens the fridge and starts pulling out various saran-wrap covered dishes, "Anyway, I made breakfast. And lunch. Actually there's probably enough food here for the next three days, assuming you're alright with eating blueberry pancakes at every meal."

"Melody," he says, taking the wrapped pancakes from her and setting them on the table, "Does this 'complicated' thing you're doing have anything do with why…. you know, _he_ isn't with you?"

She puts the plate of bacon down on the counter, and there must be something showing on her face, because Anthony quickly says, "sorry, I wasn't sure whether I should say something it's just…. I always assumed you'd show up together, you know? Not that I'm in any way…. disappointed or anything, I just…. are you….okay?"

"Just because I'm not with the Doctor, that doesn't mean I'm not okay, Anthony," she tells him, a little surprised by the defensiveness she can hear edging her voice.

He looks at her the way Rory would always look at her when he called her bluff over a friendly hand of poker.

Blasted man.

"Melody, what's going on? You're here for a reason, aren't you?"

"Seeing you isn't enough of a reason?" she asks, feeling guilty because it _should_ have been enough of a reason to bring her here a long time ago.

"Melody…." he says, and the way he says her name is gentle rather than accusing, and it draws her hearts out.

"I'm pregnant." The words slip out, surprising her before she even realizes she's decided to tell him.

Anthony's eyes fly open wide and his gaze flickers down to her stomach.

"You can't see it right now, I'm…hiding it," with a perception filter, embedded under the skin over her left hip bone, across from the bio-dampeners on her right. But he doesn't need to know that.

"Why?"

"Why am I pregnant?" she smirks at him, "Anthony, don't tell me mum and dad forgot to tell you where babies come from…."

"I'm a doctor Melody, I get that part."

She chuckles at him and his blushing, "It's kind a of a long and complicated story, and I'm really sorry, but I have to go. I'll explain later, ok?"

"Promise?" he asks her, his eyes serious and gentle.

"Promise," she agrees.

He looks at her in her tennis shoes and her glasses and her backpack, a worried crease appearing between his eyes.

"Promise you'll be safe?"

"Cross my hearts."

She kisses his cheek and he walks to the door with her. He stands on the front step and waves until she's out of sight.

When she's a block away she realizes he doesn't expect her to come back, and she bites back the guilt. Of course she's going to come back to him, but he has no way of knowing that, not really.

_"No," Twelve year old Amelia Pond says, turning away from the window and the stars, "I don't think he's coming back, Mels."_

_It's either twenty years, or two hundred years later (depending on your perspective) that Amy says to her daughter, "Sometimes I think that one day he just won't come back."_

_"Maybe, he doesn't like goodbyes."_

_"I know. And I get it, you know? It's okay."_

_"Is it?"_

_Amy sighs, tucking a few strands of red hair behind a pretty ear, "Not really, no. Just…" she pauses, then turns to face River, "promise me _you_ won't ever do that, just up and not come back one day."_

_"I promise."_

_There is a tiny little part of her that is just a little glad when Amy does the disappearing first so she can keep that promise._

She takes the train into town. It's strange, being back in the time period she grew up in, nostalgic and familiar, but a bit ill-fitting. She sits down next to a woman holding her very young daughter on her lap, and watches them out of the corner of her eye, her fingers unconsciously tracing the hem of her T-shirt.


	5. Chapter 5

"I'm Harmony." As soon as the words have left her mouth, she wants them back. So much for professionalism.

"Call me…Mo," she says, and if she says it a little too quickly and her voice trips a little bit over the nickname she's just invented on the spot, well, university Sophomore Clara Oswald isn't exactly the suspicious type. She's a sweet, trusting little thing, a little bit spunky but not an Amelia, not by a long shot, at least not yet.

"Mo? Seriously? Are you sure you're alright with that?" Clara asks, laughing. And actually, she's not alright with that, not at all. Mo is a ridiculous name, ridiculous enough to draw attention to itself, which is exactly what she's trying to avoid. And Harmony is even worse, for obvious reasons. She'd been planning on calling herself Hannah, a nice, normal name. She'd briefly considered calling herself Harmony, and she'd _wanted_ to, of course, but she'd discarded the idea quickly. Apparently not quickly enough. And now she is going to have to live with being called Mo. The only 'Mo' she'd ever known had been Amy's neighbor's cocker spaniel.

"Yeah," she says, "It's all I've been called for years, I just can't answer to anything else," she lets just a little bit of how upset she really is at that name creep onto her face and out of her mouth with a sigh.

"Right then, well I'm Clara, Clara Oswald."

"See now that is a lovely name. Thanks for the pen Clara Oswald," she says, twirling it between her fingers and grinning.

"Oh no problem, brought that from home. British pen, you know, must have been calling out to your subconscious. Good thing too, this book," she shakes her head at the item lying open in front of her on the table, "incredibly boring," she closes the book with a clap that is just a little too loud in the quiet university library.

"So, my new friend Mo," she continues brightly, smiling and leaning forward, "where are you from?"

She weaves the story of Mo's life to Clara's bright trusting smile, and within an hour they're friends. The have dinner together, laughing and chatting over hamburgers, and when Clara gets a text from her friends to join them at a club downtown, she insists on bringing Mo with her.

"I'm really not the club type, Clara," she insists, pushing at her thick glasses pointedly as they finish paying for their hamburgers and step out into a crisp early autumn evening.

"Me either, that's why you _have_ to come with me, Mo."

"Un-cool people travel in pairs?"

"Birds of a feather, Mo, we have to stick together!" Clara declares, looping her arm through River's.

It's exactly the kind of response she'd wanted, of course, for Clara to think of her that way. She has to shove down a twist of guilt anyway.

The club is too loud and River hangs back with Clara at the bar, watching her slowly nurse the drink a shady looking character down the bar a ways had bought for her. He keeps looking at Clara, and something in his eyes sets off little alarms in River's head. Clara, of course, is oblivious. She's a lightweight too, and there's already a looseness to the way she holds her glass and a slight slur to her words.

"Really Mo, you don't drink? At all?"

"It kills brain cells."

Clara giggles, "You're even more un-cool than me, Mo, I'm going to have to keep you around."

"That sounds like a great basis for our friendship, Clara," River says, jostling the tipsy girl with her shoulder and taking a drink of her coke.

A man comes up and asks Clara to dance, and she's just out of it enough to agree. She follows him to the dance floor, and she's only weaving a bit, turning back to wave at River. She looks incredibly small and somehow even younger against the crowd and the flashing lights. River returns her wave before turning back to the bar, suddenly wishing she could drink. A glass of wine would be wonderful. She picks up Clara's drink, swirling the amber liquid around the bottom of the glass a little regretfully, briefly fantasizing about a Time Lord pregnancy book she'll soon find on the TARDIS, with a line that says something like, "unlike their human counterparts, alcohol is good for the development of baby Time Lords.'"

When she looks up, something is wrong. It takes her just a moment to scan the bar and realize the man who had bought Clara's drink is no longer there. In fact he's nowhere near the bar. Alarms go off in River's head, and she's on her feet, eyes scanning the crowd as she weaves into the throng in the direction she's seen Clara go. She sees the man Clara had gone off with, dancing with a tall blonde, no Clara in sight. Which is bad, very bad.

"Excuse me!" she yells over the music, standing at his shoulder. He doesn't notice, but his partner does, a confused sort of look on her heavily made-up face as she takes in River's out-of-place clothing. She whispers something in his ear and he turns around. He doesn't seem to recognize her.

"My friend, the girl you were dancing with before, where'd she go?"

"Cute little brunette?"

"That's the one."

"Some guy wanted to talk to her, said he was from her school."

Bad. Very bad.

"Did you see where they went?"

"Um, that way I think," he says, pointing off somewhere over her left shoulder.

"Thanks," she tells him, "nice shoes," she tells his partner. They are nice shoes, strappy but with a decently thick heel, good for running. Rivers spares her tennis shoes a brief, regretful glare.

She continues through the crowd in the direction he'd said, and she finds them. He's standing too close, sort of looming, and his hand is on Clara's arm. He turns and starts walking back toward where the more private booths are, taking Clara with him. He's just sitting Clara down, a bit too insistently for comfort, when River catches up.

"There you are! Geez Clara, everyone's looking for you," she says, angling her body so she can see where his hands are at all times. Up-close she likes him even less. His eyes still have that look that had worried her before, and now the way he moves and the set of his shoulders is far too confidant, too _trained_, and it makes her fingers twitch for her gun.

"Mo!" Clara says, moving to stand up, but the stranger is still too close, and he doesn't move, blocking her from exiting the booth, "Sorry, Mo, this is….." she trails off, and River does her best not to roll her eyes, because really, who wanders off with a man twice her size who hasn't even properly introduced himself?

"Tom," the big man says, eyeing River in the same way she's been eyeing him, "my name's Tom, I've seen Clara around at school."

"So you're a student?

His smile is arrogant, and he's far too bold when he says, "I could be."

"Okay. Clara it's time to go," she says, pushing into his personal space, trying to crowd him away from Clara. For a moment he doesn't move and his hot breath fans across the back of her neck as she picks up Clara's arm and pulls her out of the booth. He doesn't smell right. There's a faint electric smell, and not enough of the earthy, sweaty, _humany_ smell that 21st century toiletries aren't developed enough to cover. She turns to face him, and with a smirk he finally takes a step back, something metallic glittering in his hand.

She takes a moment to commit his face to memory, and then takes Clara's arm and pulls her back toward the bar quickly.

"That guy was kind of creepy wasn't he Mo?" Clara yells in her ear.

"Obviously! Come _on _Clara, you can't just skip off with some guy you know nothing about! You didn't even know his _name!_"

"He bought me a drink…"

"I don't care if he saved your bloody life, do not go anywhere with weird men!"

#####

As soon as she has Clara safely secured at the bar with a group of her friends taking a break from dancing, River slips to the edge of the room and circles back toward the booths. She's just in time to see the man who had taken Clara slipping out through a back door. She follows, carefully opening the door and ducking behind some overflowing rubbish bins just outside.

Clara's new friend is talking to someone on what River recognizes immediately is a very fancy, early Time Agency issue communicator.

"-so she was interesting. Oswald though, she didn't have a clue what I was talking about."

He's quiet for a moment, listening.

"…..Of course I got a sample, a piece of hair, but I don't think it'll do any good. I scanned her and, get this, _all _the readings were inconclusive. She's got to be using bio-dampeners."

There's a longer moment of quiet, and then;

"Should I try to put a tracker on her too? She's probably still here."

There's more silence, and then,

"Right then, understood, I'll let you know how everything goes."

River moves quickly, knowing he'll be turning back to the door, and she needs to be inside, with Clara, by the time he starts looking for them. She'd apparently done enough to arouse his suspicions for one evening.

She slips quietly back into the building, watching the man turn towards the door just as she quietly pulls it closed behind her. She locks it, hoping he'll assume it's an automatic lock, and hurries back toward the bar.

Clara is still there, but her friends are not. River suppresses a flash of frustration, because really, who leaves their drunk friend alone at a bar? Especially Clara, who's already proven she has a tendency to wander off with strangers.

"Clara," she says, coming up next to her, "where did everyone go?"

"Dunno," answers Clara, and now River can see that there's another empty glass in front of her.

"Did you have another drink?"

"…yes."

"Clara, Clara, why are you doing this to yourself?" she asks her, exasperated.

Out of the corner of her eye, she notices the man from outside approaching from the direction of the front entrance. He stops when he sees them.

"Evan bought it for me."

"Evan? Who's Even?" River asks, distracted.

"Have you ever seen that one movie, with the blonde girl who sings and the glass shoes?"

"…Cinderalla?" Over Clara's stooped shoulder she watches him from the corner of her eye, but he doesn't make any attempt to get closer, which means he's either waiting for an opportunity, or he'd been told by his boss not to bother getting any trackers on her. Not that she'd let him.

"That's the one," Clara says.

"Clara, what are you talking about?"

"You know that hot bloke who marries her?"

"…the prince?"

"Yes. That's Evan," and then she starts to tear up, "but I'm not his Snow White," and then she's blubbering, still going on about Evan, and through the tears River gathers that Evan bought her the drink, and then proceeded to run off and snog some girl named Carrie. Or maybe Candy, she can't really tell.

"Okay," River says, "I think it's time to go home."

The strange man doesn't make any move to stop them, and River somehow navigates the public transportation system with Clara, who alternatives between manically happy and weepy every few minutes. At one point, she looks up from River's shoulder and says, "Mo, I think I'm drunk!"

"Really now?"

"I think so, do you think so? I've never been, before," she giggles, and then the giggling turns into tears again, and River rubs her back and watches the city slip by outside the bus window.

"Really," she whispers, "I'm the one who's supposed to be having the mood swings."

Clara manages to direct River to the dorm room where she's staying, and River stays with her, helping her get cleaned up and into pajamas before she crawls into bed.

Clara doesn't have a roommate, but the room has an extra bed, and River settles herself on it, feeling guilty that she won't make it back to Anthony tonight. She can't leave Clara alone like she is though, especially with some unknown time traveling entity apparently taking an interest in her. She also needs to figure out what kind of tracking device the man at the club had planted on her. Pulling her computer out of her pocket, River scans Clara's passed out body, and sure enough, he'd slipped nano-trackers into her blood stream, probably via injection while he was holding onto her arm. They're very good trackers too, transmitting not just her location but everything she says and does as well. The thought of it makes River's skin crawl, and her first thought is to neutralize them immediately. It would be too easy though, for him to find Clara again. Better to wait until Clara's left New York.

Unhappy but resigned River settles onto the extra bed. She checks to make sure that Clara is still very much passed out before tapping against her hip done in a specific pattern to drop the perception field around her abdomen. It's still a rather small bump, but she smiles when she sees it.

"Hello there baby," she whispers, sliding her fingers across her stomach. He's still sleeping, of course. Even through the bio-dampeners she can feel the soft, resting hum of his little mind.

"Since you're asleep, I can tell a story about your Grandma being naughty," she smiles, resting her head back and staring up at the ceiling, remembering.

_Rory collapses next to her on the floor of the hotel room, resting his head back against the mattress of the bed. _

_"Told you this was a bad idea," he says._

_"Oh _please _Rory, don't start," Mels' voice comes out muffled, her head resting against her knees, "it turned out alright in the end."_

_"Sure," Rory answers, "if by 'alright' you mean, 'avoided getting arrested'."_

_"I didn't think she'd be such a light weight," Mels says, a rare apology edging her words, "thank you for coming. I know it's far, and, uh, pretty late," she pauses, then continues softly, "you didn't have to come, you know."_

_"Mels," Rory bumps his shoulder against hers, and Mels turns her resting head to look up at him, "I'll _always_ come."_

_Behind them Amy lets out a loud, gurgling snore and they dissolve into giggles. _


End file.
